San Francisco is considering a ban on circumcision. In support of this initiative, prepuce protectionists in the City by the Bay have published a comic book that may look eerily familiar to European immigrants of a certain age. It has attracted considerable attention, and rightly so. Here.
Here’s some common sense about taxes and the welfare state, from William Voegeli.
If you missed it: here’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, explaining reality yesterday after his conversation with the President.
April 29, 2011 – 12:09 pm
In the latest New Yorker there’s an article by Ryan Lizza called “Leading from Behind”, which presents the President’s recent foreign-policy tactics as a way to do things without exposing ourselves to charges of unilateralist swagger. In a recent blog entry, Lizza explains: …at the heart of the idea of leading from behind is the […]
Not swooning over the One the way you used to? Do his declamatory cadences no longer give you that old thrill up your leg? Is the bloom off the rose? Is the honeymoon over? Are you bored with the hat, and looking for some cattle? Wish you’d ordered steak instead of sizzle? Andrew Malcolm understands.
April 26, 2011 – 10:08 pm
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to […]
Are deeds objective? If an agent performs some action X, then X influences the world’s causal network in some particular way, with particular consequences. Does it make sense to say that for the same X, X is good if performed by “good” agent Smith, and X is bad if performed by “bad” agent Jones? Why […]
April 21, 2011 – 10:55 pm
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all […]
April 20, 2011 – 11:13 pm
I haven’t written much about this — I hate to get involved in this sort of thing, and prefer to focus on matters of genuine significance — but I must come out and say that it’s downright weird that the great big noisy fuss about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth hasn’t gone away. It […]
April 19, 2011 – 10:40 pm
I’ve been busy, so for tonight, with the budget debate on everybody’s mind, just a brief item: a post by statistician William Briggs that has as its central feature a starkly simple graph, devoid of any ideological content. It merely plots the amount spent by the US government per capita, year by year, in inflation-adjusted […]
April 18, 2011 – 10:46 am
As I write, the Dow is collapsing; it’s down 237 points, and heading south. The reason? Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its long-term outlook for the US to “negative”. The reason for that? Simply put, we’ve utterly failed to demonstrate that we are serious about controlling our exploding public debt. We’ve been hurtling toward a […]
April 14, 2011 – 11:22 am
The conservative blogosphere is abuzz over Nancy Pelosi’s revealing remark that “Elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.” A sample here, from Steven Hayward at Powerline.
Here’s the latest stab at a neurological explanation of political attitudes: a study that associates conservatism with larger amygdalas, and liberalism with larger anterior cingulate gyruses. We read: Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to […]
David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times. Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent […]
This is good: Rand Paul confronts Kathleen Hogan, the Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Efficiency, on light bulbs, toilets, and bureaucratic busybodies.
February 21, 2011 – 11:48 pm
If you haven’t heard, the University of Arizona will announce on Monday the establishment of a new alma mater, to be called the Institute for Civil Discourse. The effort to institutionalize its important new curriculum — which will target militaristic metaphors, contumacious dissent-mongering, and other unseemly manifestations of political faction — was triggered by the […]
February 10, 2011 – 12:36 pm
As you’ve probably heard by now, our second-term upstate Congressman, Republican Christopher Lee of New York’s western 6th District, has resigned after having been exposed, quite literally, by a woman to whom he had sent a half-naked picture of himself by way of Craigslist. (Mr. Lee is married, with a young child.) Booth Tarkington said […]
February 3, 2011 – 4:50 pm
I’m chastened; things are worse than I thought. It seems Paul Krugman, Sherrif Dupnik, et al. were right after all: there really is a lot of racist, violent, over-the-top, “eliminationist” rhetoric out there. At a political rally deep in the Southwest, a cameraman has captured on video chilling footage of this vitriolic, inflammatory hate-speech: people […]
February 2, 2011 – 9:45 pm
Oh my. Here’s the Tera Patrick of fiscal conservatism, steaming up the lens again. Republicans concerned about the Presidential field will want to watch this in private.
January 19, 2011 – 5:41 pm
Well, I don’t know about you (and I can’t speak for the rest of my conservative friends in the Reichstag), but I’m certainly enjoying this new era of civility. May it last a thousand years!
January 18, 2011 – 7:14 pm
I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more about this.
January 8, 2011 – 2:55 pm
There is horrible news breaking from Tucson, where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat and supporter of “immigration reform” has apparently been assassinated in a mass shooting. (As of 3:13 EST it is still not certain that she has died, though several news agencies are reporting that she was killed.) Not only is this a despicable […]
December 19, 2010 – 11:22 pm
Well, Congress has gone ahead and repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I’ve already written about this topic, taking the position that the overriding concern here, by far, should be the effect of whatever policy is adopted on the effectiveness of the military. (I don’t claim to know what that effect will be ”” allowing gays […]
December 10, 2010 – 11:00 pm
Once again it’s almost eleven P.M., I’m still at work, and once again I have no time to write. (This is getting old fast, as am I.) I do have another interesting item for you, though. This time it’s about a little experiment, one that has picked out a curious difference between liberals and conservatives. […]
November 28, 2010 – 10:43 pm
In a recent editorial about the airport-security brouhaha, the Times reiterates the usual liberal cant as regards profiling. We read: Seeing conservative Republicans accuse the Obama administration of trying too hard to protect America from terrorists is a remarkable spectacle of contortion. But many of them are making a far more pernicious point. They want […]
November 16, 2010 – 8:15 pm
President Obama published a children’s book today, called Of Thee I Sing. In the book, which takes the form of a “tender, beautiful letter to his daughters”, he praises various figures from American history. We note in passing that among the “great Americans” profiled is Sitting Bull, who is best known for having led a […]
November 5, 2010 – 10:17 pm
Charles Krauthammer has written a good piece on the recent election. In particular he makes clear that this is very definitely not Republican Beatlemania: This is not, however, a rejection of Democrats as a party. The center-left party as represented by Bill Clinton remains competitive in every cycle. (Which is why he was the most […]
November 1, 2010 – 5:37 pm
We’ve been hearing an awful lot during this election cycle about our aloof “elites” (a demographic segment that generally overlaps what Scott Rasmussen defines as “the political class”). Members of the group in question understandably bristle at the characterization, preferring to imagine that they are the salt of the earth. (“Elite? Moi??”) In case you […]
October 28, 2010 – 9:07 am
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, wrote a sharp little post a couple of days ago about the divergent philosophical assumptions that inspirit the political struggle between liberals and conservatives. The problem, he argues, can be represented as an aporetic tetrad: In illustration of my thesis, consider the the values of individual liberty and material (as […]
October 26, 2010 – 11:00 pm
To define the word “chutzpah”, the example usually given is that of a teen who murders his parents, and then insists that the court take mercy on an orphan. And then there’s this. (P.S. During the several seconds I spent diligently researching this story, I also came across this feisty little website, which tickled me […]
October 18, 2010 – 10:02 pm
We’ve just got back to Gotham from a delightful weekend in Cape Cod — including a brief hop, courtesy of a friend with a a small plane, over to Martha’s Vineyard (where the lovely Nina and I first met, 35 summers ago). During the drive back to the city, we listened in on a “debate” […]
October 8, 2010 – 3:07 pm
Might this fall’s impending conservative landslide actually help Barack Obama’s chances for re-election? Victor Davis Hanson, in an essay over at NRO, makes the case that the Transformer-In-Chief might be in a position to benefit from the economic lift that a conservative Congress would provide, while telling his progressive base he’s still true to his […]
October 6, 2010 – 4:58 pm
If the Tea Party is, as I’ve suggested, an American Salafist movement, then it seems natural enough for it to quote the Prophet in justification of its own existence. (Of course the Tea Party’s “Prophet” is not one man, but many: namely, the Founding Fathers, peace be upon them.) To that end, here’s a piquant […]
September 29, 2010 – 11:26 pm
In a recent column, David Brooks had this to say about the scope of government nowadays: The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another. Financiers send the world into recession and don’t […]
September 15, 2010 – 11:31 pm
Tea Party candidates made a strong showing in primary elections yesterday, and as a conservative sort myself I can’t say I was sorry to see it happen. The American people are roused to righteous anger, and by all indications, there are going to be an awful lot of wigs on the green come November. Of […]
September 14, 2010 – 10:43 am
Back in July we looked at the details of an onerous provision hidden deep inside the recent health-care bill. It was a little booby-trap requiring that businesses file 1099-MISC forms for all purchases over $600 — mandating an enormous compliance burden on small businesses, in an effort to bleed enough private-sector money into the public […]
September 9, 2010 – 10:20 pm
With a hat-tip to reader JK, here’s my favorite campaign video of the season.
August 6, 2010 – 11:12 pm
Elena Kagan lately having been confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, John Derbyshire gives us a preview on this week’s Radio Derb (transcript here) of what he thinks we’ll be getting: Look for lots of wonderful new rights to be discovered buried in the Constitution ”” things that mysteriously escaped the attention of […]
August 5, 2010 – 10:09 pm
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention a hot item: the rank and file of ICE (that’s the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Union) have issued an angry letter announcing a vote of no confidence in their director, John Morton, and assistant director, Phyllis Coven. The letter says that the enforcement agents were, in effect, intentionally prevented […]
In a recent post, I linked to an essay by Heather Mac Donald in which she wondered whether the DOJ’s assumption of “preemption” might apply to Arizona’s enforcement of immigration law, and not just its creation of law (the law in question being, of course, the controversial S.B. 1070). In other words, Ms. Mac Donald […]
August 2, 2010 – 10:07 pm
Yet another excellent item from today’s above-average miscellany at NRO: a balanced and thoughtful essay on the banning of the burqa, by independent journalist Claire Berlinsky. Ms. Berlinsky begins by acknowledging the many good arguments against such a ban — in particular the compelling point (previously emphasized here at waka waka waka by commenters Peter […]
Lots of good reading over at NRO today. Heather Mac Donald has contributed a thoughtful analysis of the legal tug-of-war between Arizona and the DOJ over S.B. 1070 and the question of “preemption”. What does the existing body of case law indicate: does “preemption doctrine” apply only to statutes, or can it be extended to […]
In an essay that is sure to have critics across the aisle whetting their ad hominem knives, Arthur Laffer explains why soak-the-rich tax increases are a bad idea. Here.
According to a recent release from Gallup: PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage […]
Paul Krugman has been awfully lathered up lately. His fulminating resentment of conservatives for causing all the world’s ills (and worse, for disregarding his Olympian sagacity) has gotten downright pyretic, and in his twice-weekly tirades he seems — due, no doubt, to the July heat — increasingly indifferent to the need to clothe his recriminations […]
The influential (and generally non-partisan) think-tank The Cato Institute has published an in-depth assessment of the recent health-care bill. It’s a hefty read, and not at all encouraging. Here.
On September 6th, 1824, at Monticello, the eighty-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to one William Ludlow (my emphasis): …I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the sea coast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition, insomuch as that we are at this time […]
Within the IRS is an agency called the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Here’s what it is, according to the IRS.gov website: The Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) is an independent organization within the IRS whose employees assist taxpayers who are experiencing economic harm, who are seeking help in resolving tax problems that have not been resolved through […]
The DOJ has now uncorked its long-threatened lawsuit against Arizona for the latter’s audacity in attempting to enforce Federal law to stem the disastrous tide of undocumented Democrats streaming into the state from across the border. Blogger Ann Althouse examines the suit’s premises here. Her commenter “Mesquito” crisply summed up the seething frustration of a […]